Should mailboxes be removed?

I'm usually against conveniences in games. I want there to be a bit of an effort to do things, as well as immersion in the game world.

But lately, mailboxes have started bugging me.

They litter the mini-map and take up space around it.

They are everywhere in towns nowadays, which is not only illogical but also looks daft.

They force you to go somewhere just to trade with your alt or receive some money from the Auction House, or when you receive a letter from an NPC.

Why not take the Guild Wars 2 route and place the mailbox in the interface? If you want it to make sense lore-wise, just say the Ethereals did it.

"Good morning!" said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out farther than the brim of his shady hat.

I would love to have mailboxes always with your character, but it's something that might not happen. Lore wise I would say it would be Gnomes and Goblins that would come up with the idea, of course the Goblin version would need to explode and throw your mail at, but this feature I don't believe is really needed nor wanted at this time.

They are everywhere in towns nowadays, which is not only illogical but also looks daft.

They force you to go somewhere just to trade with your alt or receive some money from the Auction House, or when you receive a letter from an NPC.

1) Turn the option off to show mail boxes on mini-map then?
2) "Everywhere" might be a slight exaggeration. They are mostly played conventionally, outside of banks and AH with a few scattered around where there is no AH/bank
3) If by force, you mean 10 seconds travel, if you are in a town. If you aren't, get Engineering and have a portable mailbox.

This arguement seems to be something just to get at Blizzard, bringing up the "Well this MMO did it, so WoW HAS to have it" argument, and then moaning at Blizzard when they start taking ideas from other mmos.

I don't know about where you live, but here in my city there are hundreds, if not thousands of mailboxes. And I'm just referring to the ones you send mail with. Obviously there are a million mailboxes, one for each building/house/apartment. Orgrimmar is meant to hold the vast majority of the Orcs. The in-game representation doesn't really do it justice, but if you think of it as a big city, having a lot of mailboxes does make sense.

I think a good chunk of the people on here, and the developers themselves would say that having to go to a mailbox limits your access to things, which is why Moll-e is such a valued item. It's a part of the gameplay and I wouldn't want to see it slashed in favour of convenience. Not everything has to be convenient.

Benevolence is a luxury for the strong - Wrathion
Plox. I got your plox right fucking here. - Animalhouse
I still prefer seeing Thrall rather than blood in my urine, that doesnt make him a good character. - Verdugo

One advantage, apart from the RP value of having actual mail boxes in the game, is that by forcing people to go to a mailbox in order to make mailings it probably reduces strain on the mail protocol on the server.

Plus could you imagine the bandwidth wasted by gold sellers if they could just spam mail out from any location? It would pretty much force blizzard to add a countdown timer to sending mail. Which would be inconvenient if you have a lot of stuff to mail between alts.

One advantage, apart from the RP value of having actual mail boxes in the game, is that by forcing people to go to a mailbox in order to make mailings it probably reduces strain on the mail protocol on the server.

Plus could you imagine the bandwidth wasted by gold sellers if they could just spam mail out from any location? It would pretty much force blizzard to add a countdown timer to sending mail. Which would be inconvenient if you have a lot of stuff to mail between alts.

You do realize that gold sellers use teleport hacks and dont actually "walk" from start zone to first mailbox possible, right? The strain would remain the same, or even be less because they just log in for few seconds and log off rather than use hacks to get to city etc. But even then the difference is minimal.

Also RP value is good but I havent heard anyone that would be into mailboxes in RP servers.

Also I feel that OP's "gw2 has this" will backfire on them pretty damn fast. All ideas that are mentioned with "In gw2/swtor/Rift" will get lynched pretty fast directly or indirectly.

As for me? It would be bit better in-game. Stormwind, ogrimmar..and well all other cities (cept for undercity for some reason) has so many mailboxes its ridiculous.
It would be quality of life change - no need to run around mailboxes while playing the AH. But more time spend running about the better, eh?

"when women wear makeup they’re basically lying to us"
Well, I don’t see why women are being blamed if man is stupid enough to really think they have red and gold eyelids.

Me:
"Hey, what do you think of flying mounts? Sort of ruins immersion, right?

Everybody else:
"NO! I love convenience, and flying mounts are awesome cause it means I don't have to run everywhere to do stuff!"

Me:
"Hey, what do you think of mailboxes? Sort of of a hassle, right?"

Everybody else:
"NO! I hate convenience, and mail boxes are great cause it's nice to have the little immersive things in the world!"

"Good morning!" said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out farther than the brim of his shady hat.